


rewritten

by labocat



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Aliens, Gen, Outer Space Is Chock Full Of Eldritch Horrors, actual aliens, ancient aliens - Freeform, canon knowledge through osmosis, one-way time travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2021-01-27 02:44:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21384784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/labocat/pseuds/labocat
Summary: to change the past requires a long game
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7
Collections: Osmosis Exchange





	rewritten

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Silex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/gifts).

> This was written for an osmosis flash exchange - trying to combine what canon knowledge I've absorbed from friends with the sign-up prompts - to which I was very surprised to see aliens come up, so this is my attempt at that. Enjoy what is almost definitely incorrect, but perhaps might've been, once upon a time early in the writer's room!

It took a while for him to start seeing the signs. Once he knew to look for them, he could find them, strange letters or symbols that were out of place from whichever time period he was plugged into at the time. Carved into the side of a door in Syria, painted on the corner of a sign of a shop in Venice - almost a roadmap of where to go, who to talk to.

It made him wonder who had put them there, but he didn’t wonder about what it meant for him, in the future until it was too late. Who was actually sending him on these missions, whose plan was so long-reaching it went back thousands of years, waiting to be played out? How had they ever expected everything to go right? (now that he thought about it, he could remember seeing flashes of the symbols in the corner of his vision if he made a misstep, jolting back to the pod to try again)

It wasn’t until he started to see the symbols even outside of the lab that he became concerned. The first one he thought was a trick of the light, then some sort of graffiti symbol, just a coincidence brought about by too much time in the past, watching for them there. Then they started appearing everywhere, even on the backs of his eyelids when he tried to sleep.

He tried not to sleep - his dreams were all of other people’s lives at this point, no longer an escape from them.

In the end, it felt much like being pulled out of the past, that jolt of feeling, the hook behind his navel and the rush of everything past him as the world reformed. Except this time when he woke up, it wasn’t in the pod.

They were standing over him, circled around as best large, glowing creatures with indeterminate shapes could actually form a circle. They watched him as he blinked, as he struggled to get his bearings. They made sounds, but nothing his brain recognized as language until one reached a tendril out to his head. 

“Welcome, Desmond.” The words were clear, but underneath them he could still hear the odd sounds. “You are here because you have done well and we believe you are ready.”

“Ready for what?” he croaked out, still trying to grapple with the fact that this was happening.

“Ready to set our plan fully into motion. Your missions up until now have been trial runs, to see if you were able to play your role properly - the Templars were a distraction. Our true goal is to change the course of human history, and that can only be done by sending you further back than you’ve ever been. For this, we needed you here, and acclimated.”

“Acclimated…” Suddenly the increase of symbols flashed through his mind, the feeling so similar but far more intense of being pulled out of the past.

“When is this?”

A hum of approval. “A good question, you do catch on quickly. We are 3000 years from what you believed was your present. We will be sending you far enough back this time to pave our way, our acceptance, onto Earth. We will rule it like we should have from the start.”

A mass of tentacles rose and began to wrap around him, covering every inch, entwining and overlapping as they encased him. Eventually even the glow of those responsible was blocked out and his vision went dark. 

When he opened his eyes again, it was to a jungle, a great ziggurat before him, fresh stone and fresh history waiting to be carved and rewritten. He got to work.


End file.
